16 Simple and Helpful Ways to Improve Health and Wellness
Anxiety and stress is a typical part of life and a byproduct of living in a busy world. It isn’t all bad, though. It makes you aware of danger, motivates you to stay organized and prepared, and helps you calculate risks. Still, when anxiety and stress becomes a daily recurrence, it may greatly impact your quality of life and finding ways to improve health and wellness can become overwhelming.
Ways to Improve Health and Wellness for Less Anxiety and Stress
Manage anxiety and reduce stress by trying out these helpful ways to promote health and wellness.
Regular Exercise or Daily Movement Activities
Regular exercise isn’t only helpful to your physical health — it can be a huge help to your mental health as well. It has been shown that people with anxiety disorders who reported a high level of physical activity experience anxiety symptoms less often.
Here are 5 simple but impactful exercises you can do today:
Walking
Stretching
Yoga
Dancing
Jogging
Expose Your Body to Sunlight
Vitamin D is known to lower cortisol for up to 40%. If you don’t know yet, cortisol is the stress-producing hormone which can also be the culprit in your weight gain especially in the belly area.
Now, if you’re living in a place where daily sunlight exposure isn’t available, you may want to supplement by eating eggs, mushrooms, dairy fat, or fatty fish.
Drink Water
In one of our blogs, I shared about how to maximize the absorption of water into your body by using a helpful addon to your drink. Now, I would love to share this amazing hack to instantly minimize your anxiety or stress levels with drinking water.
Drink your regular water intake doing these quick steps:
First, take water into your mouth
Next, gargle for 15 seconds
Finally, swallow the water
Do this for 3 times to help slow down your nervous system, allow yourself to relax, and calm down quickly.
Take Proper Sleep
The brain does its recovery phase during sleep time so people who are not having enough sleep or trouble falling asleep may have chances of having symptoms such as irritability, poor focus, and stress. If these symptoms show up too often, it may later lead to Alzheimer’s disease as researchers have discovered.
In case you’re having sleep issues, it would be best to visit your doctor, or a functional medicine doctor (if you prefer more natural remedies) to learn the root cause of the problem and get help on how you can manage it.
Practice Gratitude
Taking a pause and practicing gratitude may not give you instant relief from stress and anxiety but over time, if you do it regularly, you’re training your mind and body to refocus on the good. It starts from being aware about your current emotion, taking a moment to understand it, and then being a master of your own action about it.
Here are fun ways to practice gratitude:
Sending “Thank you” notes to your family and friends
Creating your Gratitude Jar and reading your notes every week or end of the month
Crafting a Gratitude Wall where every member of the family can write and post notes
Smile Often
Well, this may sound as the simplest on this list, but it’s often undone or done wrongly. What do I exactly mean? It’s just so easy for you to smile, but sharing a genuine one is sometimes the tough part. In times you’re in this situation, it helps to pay attention to your body too. Try to straighten your back and flash a smile on your face. How did it feel? Now, keep that smile on your face and slouch your back. Did you feel the instant change in your emotion?
Save and Invest
Oh, why all of a sudden, we’re talking about saving and investing? Overall health and wellness covers the Financial dimension of our life as mentioned in our previous post. And you may not want to admit it but if there’s no money flowing in your life, no matter how much good you want to do, you’ll be limited and this feeling of lack leads to stress. As they say, you can’t share what you don’t have.
Here’s a quick tip on saving and investing:
Save a portion of your income consistently then invest it in a business that allows you to earn a passive income. Once you’re able to expand your income, you’ll be capable of helping more people.
Aim for a Sustainable Source of Income
Not having a stable source of income can be a great cause of anxiousness and worry.
I’ve been in the sales business for 20+ years and as a team lead, I’ve discovered amazing business opportunities that allowed me to become one of the top 5% of income earners in the health and wellness space. My desire to share the strategies made me come up with this blog and the Health and Biz Bites podcast. Book a call with me if you’re interested to hear more about the sales strategies you can also apply in your own business.
Build Relationships
Do you believe that “No man is an island”?
If I were to live my life again, I would still choose to be with the same people and network that I have met in the past and those who stayed until today. How about you?
If you haven’t yet, go expand your network, strengthen what you already have, and nurture the relationships. Having healthy relationships with yourself and other people surely boost your dopamine (happy hormones) levels in sooo many ways.
Give Back as a Way to Improve your Health and Wellness
There’s an instant reward from the act of “Giving”. People who practice giving get quality and longer sleep, minimized chances of high blood pressure, and are resilient to stress. To make this practice your best natural remedy for anxiety, think of it as helping rather than just merely “giving”. Now, just imagine the ripple effect that your simple action can do. Doesn’t it feel amazing?
Clean your Body and your Environment
Drinking alcohol may take the edge off at first, since it’s a natural sedative. However, limiting your alcohol intake can improve both anxiety and depression.
Aside from cleaning your body from possible sources of stressors and/or toxins like too much alcohol, it’s also great to maintain a clean environment. Declutter your office, home, and digital content and consume or use apps and/or objects that serve you best.
Meditate
A main goal of meditation is for full awareness of the present moment. This includes noticing all thoughts in a nonjudgmental way which can lead to a sense of calm and contentment.
Now, for people experiencing anxiety and stress, shallow and fast breathing is common. It may lead to a fast heart rate, dizziness or lightheadedness, or even a panic attack. Try using this deep breathing exercise to help restore normal breathing patterns and reduce anxiety.
Step 1: Breathe in for four seconds
Step 2: Hold for four seconds
Step 3: Breathe out for four seconds
Step 4: Hold for four seconds
Do this multiple times until you feel better. In case you feel like you’re gonna pass out, don’t keep holding your breath.
Genuinely serve your clients or your company
Are you an entrepreneur who wants to leave a huge impact on humanity? Do you see yourself leading a movement that influences the lives of many? Or would you want to be a role model to your colleagues in the company you work for or represent?
What’s a better way to feel less worried and stressed than serving with a genuine purpose to fulfill your business’ vision and mission? Think of one task you do so well and add another 1% to your effort - it matters.
Set and Achieve Goals
Goals are better achieved when it’s set in a really clear and specific manner. However, for people who are prone to depression and anxiety, it’s a different story. It’s not that this is a one-size-fits-all solution but try setting mini goals from your bigger ones.
Apart from the rewarding feeling from accomplishing tiny tasks one by one, it also helps you build a routine in the long run. In the end, what seems to be a really huge project for you in the beginning becomes less-stressful to deal with.
Commit to Learn and Grow
Every single one of us wants to live a life that is as fulfilling as possible. Sharpen your mind and whole body through personal growth so that you’ll achieve your maximum potential.
Here are quick tips to do that:
Be comfortable feeling uncomfortable
Have the willingness to be helped and mentored
Find the best tools for improvement
Set a schedule for learning and growth
Discover New Hobbies
Are hobbies even recommended for busy people?
When you feel depressed, routines can become just so boring to even start with. Am I right? Now, if your time is limited, you might not even think of sneaking in some “spare” time for hobbies or “extracurriculars”. But on days when you feel like not doing anything, a hobby becomes really helpful to get your creative juices flowing again.
Go on, live your life my friend. Do other things you love to do.
Conclusion: Important Ways to Improve Wellness
Improving your overall health and wellness doesn’t happen overnight but these really simple ways will get you far from where you’re at right now. You can create a checklist out of it and try to incorporate 3 to 5 of them in your daily routine. Add more to your list gradually and you won’t even notice that the first ones that you’ve been practicing will become consistent habits in the long run.
If you’re wanting to discover actionable ways to optimize your health through food intake, get the free PDF by subscribing below or read the Ultimate Guide to Optimize Your Health and Wellness here.
